Free yourself of the clutter
CLEAN UP: Get your digital house in order — and make life a little less complicated
Technology moves fast, changing in a heartbeat. It’s all daunting, unless you’re 18.
I spoke with Deb Lee, a digital business coach and productivity consultant, to find out how to stay organized and manage digital clutter:
The proper tools
Ask yourself: Where do you run into problems with your work — do you miss deadlines, spend too much time looking for documents or emails, or have a hard time prioritizing your tasks? Do tasks take more time than they should? What would you like to spend more or less time doing?
Identify problems to map out a solution. Don’t keep downloading apps just because friends recommend them or because they might be useful in solving a problem you haven’t yet identified.
To-do lists and calendars
Lee recommends apps such as Evernote or Any.do for taking notes and keeping lists. Evernote is popular because of features such as the Web Clipper, searching for text in images and business-card scanning. Lee likes Any.do for its to-do list, as well as its collaborative and reminder features. Google Keep is also popular. Each of these apps is available across platforms and has free and paid options.
Inbox
Lee says, it’s OK to give up on the concept of having zero emails in your inbox at the end of the day, because it requires a lot of time to achieve. Instead, she recommends focusing on decreasing junk email and organizing emails that you want to keep.
Many people have no idea that apps can help manage their inboxes. Astro gets high marks for its email and calendar functions but works only with Gmail and Microsoft’s Office 365. The Gmail app is also well regarded if you use Google services, and the Outlook app can sort and show only the most important emails from those you interact with most often.
Washington Consumers’ Checkbook recently recommended a free app called Unroll. Me to decrease junk email. It shows your email subscriptions, and you choose what to do with each — unsubscribe, keep or receive a Rollup digest in a daily summary. Be diligent about not signing up for too many lists, and unsubscribe from unwanted lists as soon as the first email arrives.
Lee recommends scheduling time in the morning and at night to review and respond to emails. If you’re constantly moving between a work document, your personal inbox, incoming texts and phone calls, you’re wasting energy and pressuring your brain to refocus on each new task.
Digital estate
Make sure loved ones know how to access what Lee calls your “digital estate.” Much of our personal information and finances are increasingly online, and if you die unexpectedly, someone needs to know how to access your computer, your phone — all of it. Keeping track of passwords and knowing your login information will save time, but it is imperative that someone close to you knows how to access your digital files, too. Either write down all of your important passwords and give them to a friend or relative for safekeeping or, better yet, store your digital access list with your estate attorney or by using a password-management service such as Last Pass or Dashlane.
Digital maintenance and backup
Set aside time each week for filing documents, updating to-do lists, and deleting unwanted emails and duplicate photos. If you have a busy week, just do a little more the following week. It may take longer in the beginning, but once you’ve developed a system, maintenance will be more straightforward.
It’s critical that you back up your computer to either an external hard drive or a cloud service. Cloud services are increasingly the preferred method because they allow you to access your documents, including photos, videos and music collections, from anywhere, and syncing features can make your backup automatic. Lee recommends Bynder, which not only stores and backs up your files but also uses artificial intelligence to organize images.
Lee also recommends we unplug completely for several days at least once a year. It’s beneficial to be reminded we can survive without our devices, and there’s no way to do that unless we put them away and talk to people.